Take This Man by Brando Skyhorse Read Free Book Online

keep track of his son’s accomplishments by checking the box scores in the newspaper. Drafted by the army in 1971, Frank had poor marksmanship that kept him out of Vietnam. He served out his nineteen-month, twenty-two-day hitch at Fort Ord in Northern California, smoking dope and forging a lifelong passion for the Beatles and his favorite songwriter, Paul Williams, a 1970s version of Pharrell Williams with better lyrics.
    When he was discharged, Frank lived briefly with his father, whose idea of demonstrative love hadn’t changed, and then moved back in with his grandmother, shuffling between colleges before landing at the University of Southern California. One day on campus he saw on a bulletin board an ad posted by the California Employment Development Department seeking fluent Spanish speakers to work part-time as claims examiners.
    â€œMust be Mexican,” the ad said. (Because, its writers assumed, who else in Los Angeles would know how to speak Spanish ?)
    Worried that he’d face competition for the job, Frank ripped down the ad even though the only Hispanics he saw on campus were athletes on scholarship who didn’t need jobs.
    The state job offered a salary higher than minimum wage and a promise for job security, but that wasn’t what interested Frank. He had plans , focusing at any one time on: the police academy, the comedy club circuit, the theater, and, ranking above them all, the recording studio. He couldn’t play an instrument and knew he had no voice, but he took songwriting classes and workshops, entering songwriting contests and festivals with knockoffs of popular songs. He wrote a ­variation of Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome” with the lyrics changed around and an original tune called “Little Miss Emotion”: “You have my love, you have my devotion / C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, Little Miss Emotion.” Working for the state turned out to be a good temporary job—he’d met his “babe” Maria there, and the mother sitting across from him was so much like the abuelita he’d lost—but he needed to remind himself that he was destined for big things.
    Frank felt a small tug at his side. I’d approached him, holding a book. At that age, books held my hand everywhere.
    â€œLook it,” I said. “My grandmother is reading this.”
    â€œReally?” Frank asked. “What is it?”
    â€œThe Lincoln Conspiwacy,” I lisped.
    Frank looked at the book jacket. “That’s right,” he said and smiled.
    He’d tell his friends, his stepmother, anyone who would listen, about the Kid That Reads Adult Books, but nobody was as impressed as he was. What was wrong with them? C’mon , he thought, this kid is really something else . What they couldn’t see was how a little boy could remind Frank of himself just by holding a book.
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    â€œThat’s my tiger!” Frank said, and held me aloft in his arms.
    If you asked what my first “father” memory is, there is just Frank. Six foot, more than 225 pounds. “Tall and big for a Mexican,” he liked to say.
    He spoke in a warm, un-Latino-accented declarative voice full of confidence that could make asinine pronouncements sound like jazzy traffic reports: “The Beatles didn’tmake history, they are history.”
    He fire-rubbed his palms together and schoolboy “ Woo-hoo ! ”-ed before a drive anywhere. He revved up his 1970s avocado green Dodge van, with its wood paneling, shag carpeting, leather bench seat in the back, and Beatles-fan license plate reading LENNMAC, and played “Macca’s” Band on the Run or Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty . If it was cold, Frank wore a custom-made nylon silver jacket with the title of his favorite Jackson Browne song, “The Pretender,” stitched across the back.
    If Candido is a blank space, memories of Frank are like flashcards.